This invention relates to the field of social media networking services and online communities. Social media networking web sites have become very popular in recent years, especially with the youth and college-age demographics. Social media networking web sites allow users to create profiles describing themselves. Users can then create relationships between their profiles and those of their friends, classmates, and colleagues. Typical social media networking web sites allow users to utilize these relationship-based connections to keep in touch with friends, find new friends, network for career opportunities, share media, carry on discussions around topics and shared media, and to show social capital by accumulating appreciation from, or relationships with, other users.
Although social media networking web sites are useful for communicating and sharing resources with peers, typical social media networking web sites have limited facilities for user engagement. Typically, social media networking web site content is limited to viewing other users' profiles, text comments, and contributed audio-visual media. User engagement is limited to acquiring relationships with users, browsing user-contributed media, and conversing with peers via these relationships about shared media. There have been few applications of social media networking web sites other than as a communications and simple self-expression system. As a result of their limited uses, many potential users, especially adult users, find reduced value in social media networking web sites.
Many users are attracted to social media networking web sites because online profiles give users the opportunity to create a noteworthy online identity and stand out from the crowd. User profiles on typical social media networking web sites allow users to describe their interests in general terms. Users can also create freeform journal or blog entries discussing their activities and interests. However, users' online identities are fixed to the social media networking web site and cannot be utilized on other web sites or online services.
Additionally, these types of user profiles do not provide any structure for continued engagement and interaction with the social media networking web site. Many users create an initial profile and then rarely update it. Thus, many social media networking web sites have large numbers of stagnant virtual communities filled with rarely updated user profiles and passive users. Typical social media networking websites have few incentives in place to encourage user participation and interaction.
Additionally, social media networking web sites have had difficulty demanding premium advertising rates. Despite having large numbers of users, most social media networking web sites know very little about the demographics, psychographics, personal interests, and consumption behavior of their users apart from their age, home location, gender, and simple declarations of hobbies present on their profile pages. Advertisements precisely targeted at narrowly defined groups or micro-communities (such as golfers, independent music fans, wine lovers, etc.) are generally much more effective than untargeted advertisements, and thus can command substantially higher fees from advertisers. Because of the dearth of information about user interests and intent on typical social media networking web sites, it is difficult for these social media networking web sites to offer the type of targeted advertising desired by advertisers.
Moreover, social media networking web sites often feature large amounts of user-generated (as opposed to professionally produced) content. Advertisers are reluctant to purchase advertising shown in conjunction with user-generated content, because the user-generated content may create brand conflicts. The content may be offensive to the target audience or disparaging to the product or brand. To overcome this reluctance, some social media networking web sites use humans to review and approve user-generated content as safe for advertising. Because of the large volume of user-generated content created by social media networking and social media web sites with hundreds of thousands or millions of users, using human reviewers is time consuming and expensive, making it very impractical. The delay between the time user-generated content is submitted and when it is approved for advertising often means that user-generated content is “stale” by the time it is ready to accept advertisements. Moreover, advertisers miss the opportunity to reach users attracted by new or topical user-generated content.
There is a need for a social media networking service that provides additional uses besides profile networking, user communications and simple multimedia sharing to engage a wider range of increasingly sophisticated users. There is a need for a social networking service that is useful when accessed from personal computers as well as mobile devices such as cellular phones. There is a need for a social media networking service to provide richer and more detailed user profiles and to provide incentives to users to build and maintain their online identities. There is also a need for a social media networking service to enable users to export their online identities to other web sites and services.
There is also a need for a social media networking service to collect detailed demographic, behavioral, experiential, and interest information from its users to enhance their experience and to provide opportunities for targeted advertisements. There is a need to accurately classify and integrate user-generated content into the social media networking web site. There is also a need for social media networking sites to automatically recognize communities users of common interests, both for enhancing user interactions and for advertising purposes. There is a need for a social media networking service to enable advertisers to interact with users and large amounts of user-generated content while reducing the cost and delays normally associated with the review and approval of user-generated content and alleviating the concerns about brand conflicts.